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Fibrant Network Gains Subscribers Despite Technical Difficulties
As we emphasize time and time again, communities build their own networks because they have to, not because they want to. North Carolina's Fibrant network in Salisbury is no exception and a recent technical headache is a reminder that no network is built without problems developing.
Fortunately, Salisbury's strong reputation for providing great, local customer service is helping as it deals with service interruptions that are the fault of the gear that runs the network.
According to an Emily Ford article in the Salisbury Post, there have been several outages this month. While some outages are attributed to unreliable access gear, the city is still investigating to determine what other factors continue to cause problems. The network currently serves 2,160 subscribers, with 220 of them being commercial customers.
A November 9th Post article on an earlier outage, noted the problem with faulty equipment. A statement from Fibrant General Manager Mike Jury also attributed the outage to a lack of redundancy, which has since been repaired.
While Zhone has been the access gear supplier, Fibrant is now testing Calix equipment. Calix has long been a favored choice among community networks and has a very solid reputation. This is a reminder to communities of the importance of due diligence in choosing vendors -- make sure to talk to other community networks about their experiences with vendors. All equipment is subject to failure, so a key question should be how quickly different vendors respond with solutions to problems.
This technical problem comes on the heels of political problems as Salisbury has been targeted by Time Warner Cable for attacks. Readers will recall how Time Warner Cable successfully pushed the Legislature to pass H129 in 2011, a bill to neutralize publicly owned networks.
Even though there have been recent outages, more people continue to take the service than to drop it. From the Ford article:
The week before the outage, 23 new subscribers signed up.
Salisbury's Fibrant Hits 1600 Subscribers
The muni FTTH network owned by the city of Salisbury, North Carolina, is finishing the calendar year with over 1600 subscribers. The network just began signing up customers 13 months ago.
“We already said in the first four years, we would not break even,” City Councilman Brian Miller said. “That’s not a surprise to anyone.” According to documents, the city expects Fibrant to become cash-flow positive after four years. The city billed the first Fibrant customers one year ago in December 2010. The city expects Fibrant to eliminate its deficit as more people sign up and revenues increase. The utility, which competes with private providers like Time Warner Cable, has a 13 percent market share, interim City Manager Doug Paris said, and is billing about $200,000 a month. “We’re growing in what is an extremely tough market,” Paris said. Paris said after the meeting Fibrant has about 1,600 customers. The utility needs about 4,500 to become cash-flow positive.Salisbury has a new mayor coming into office, but he is a supporter of the network, as was the outgoing mayor, who spent a significant amount of time defending the community network from Time Warner Cable's attacks via the state legislature.
Fibrant Buys More Set-Top Boxes
Salisbury's Fibrant network, a muni FTTH network in North Carolina that is approaching its one year anniversary, has decided to celebrate by ordering 5,000 set-top boxes. Because the order was so large and only available from a single vendor due to software issues, City Council had to approve the deal.
The city will order 5,000 additional set-top boxes for Fibrant at the discounted price of $721,572… Fibrant’s original inventory of 5,000 set-top boxes purchased in March 2010 is running low, Behmer said. The city’s new broadband utility, which sells Internet, cable TV and phone services to Salisbury residents, has about 1,200 customers and averages about three set-top boxes per home, he said.This is a reminder of the economics of these networks. Each set-top box costs something like $150. Household that subscribes for television service average 3 set-stop boxes, meaning that the cost of those boxes alone is about $450 of loss to Fibrant before the subscriber pays a dime to Fibrant. This is why muni networks take so long to break even. The additional install costs like the equipment on the side of the house and the labor to set everything up grow quickly -- often to between $1200-$1500 per subscriber. It takes years to pay down those costs, plus the interest of borrowing to build the network. So when you hear that a community network is running in the red in year 3, you should say, "Duh." Infrastructure often takes a long time to pay off, which is one of the main reasons the private sector does such a poor job of providing it.
Community Networks Provide Cable/Broadband Competition That is Otherwise Unlikely
You can also read this story over at the Huffington Post.
How can it be that the big companies who deliver some of the most important services in our modern lives (access to the Internet, television) rank at the top of the most hated? Probably because when they screw up or increase prices year after year, we have no choice but sticking with them. Most of us have no better options.
But why do we have so few choices? Government-sanctioned monopolies have been outlawed since the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Unfortunately, the natural tendency of the telecommunications industry is toward consolidation and monopoly (or duopoly). In the face of this reality, the federal government has done little to protect citizens and small businesses from telecom market failings.
But local governments have stepped up and built incredible next-generation networks that are accountable to the community. These communities have faster speeds (at lower prices) than the vast majority of us.
Most of these communities would absolutely prefer for the private sector to build the necessary networks and offer real competition, but the economics of telecom makes that as likely as donuts becoming part of a healthy breakfast. In most cases, the incumbent cable and telephone companies are too entrenched for any other company to overbuild them. But communities do not have the same pressures to make a short-term profit. They can take many years to break even on an investment that creates many indirect benefits along the way.
One might expect successful companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable to step up to the challenge posed by community networks, and they have. Not by simply investing more and competing for customers, but by using their comparative advantage – lobbying state legislatures to outlaw the competition.
New Video: Community Fiber Networks Better than Phone, Cable Networks
Update: You can also watch the video over at the Huffington Post, in our first post as a HuffPo blogger.
While we were battling Time Warner Cable to preserve local authority in North Carolina, we developed a video comparing community fiber networks to incumbent DSL and cable networks to demonstration the incredible superiority of community networks.
We have updated the video for a national audience rather than a North Carolina-specific approach because community fiber networks around the country are similarly superior to incumbent offerings. And community networks around the country are threatened by massive corporations lobbying them out of existence in state legislatures.
Feel free to send feedback - especially suggestions for improvement - to broadband@muninetworks.org.
Without further ado, here is the new video comparing community fiber networks to big incumbent providers:
Public Testimony in Senate Finance Committee Against Time Warner Cable bill in North Carolina
We have again isolated individual comments from the arguments around Time Warner Cable's bill to strip local authorities of the right to build broadband networks vastly superior to their services. On April 13, the Senate Finance Committee allowed public comment on TWC's H129 bill. Craig Settles has posted an extended story about a small business struggling to get by with the existing paucity of service in her community.
There was no hope that I could efficiently communicate, collaborate, and share online documents and applications with clients and peer professionals. I couldn’t even buy a functional phone line. For years I paid for a level of service from Centurylink that I can only describe as absolutely embarrassing.
This bill will make it vastly harder, if not impossible, for communities to build the necessary infrastructure to succeed in the digital economy. Listening to those pushing the bill, it is very clear they have no conception of the vast difference between barely broadband DSL from CenturyLink and Wilson's Greenlight community fiber network -- essentially the difference between a hang glider and a Boeing 747. And many in North Carolina don't even have access to the hang glider! Yet the Legislature cares more about protecting the monopoly of powerful companies that contribute to their campaigns than ensuring all residents and businesses have access to the fast, affordable, and reliable broadband they need to flourish.
Thanks to Voter Radio for making audio from the hearing available. Each of the following comments is approximately 2 minutes long.
Salisbury's Neighbors to State Legislature: Don't Kill Our Fibrant Dreams
Time Warner Cable's bill to kill competition by limiting the right of communities to build their own broadband networks will have a committee hearing this week in North Carolina's Senate. Stop the Cap! has details in its action alert -- we encourage people to continue contacting their Senators as well as contacting local officials and telling them to contact Senators.
We have seen some interesting news coming out of North Carolina recently, including Salisbury connecting its 500th customer to its publicly owned Fibrant network [pdf]. Additionally, some nine nearby communities have told Raleigh they want to preserve their right to be served by Fibrant (the bill would greatly limit the territory in which Fibrant can expand, unlike private companies which have the freedom to expand across the state). The story starts with a church in one of the communities, Faith:
Mahoney said his church, Faith Baptist, would like faster Internet speeds but can’t afford the $20,000 Time Warner Cable would charge to build a business-class circuit for the church. Church members are not satisfied with DSL service from Windstream, Mahoney said.
With New Hope, North Carolina Broadband Struggle Continues
On Wednesday morning, March 22, the House Finance Committee will again consider H 129, a bill from Time Warner Cable to make it all but impossible for communities to build their own broadband networks. But now, as noted by Craig Settles, the momentum is shifting.
Last week, advocates had a big victory when Representatives Faison and Warren successfully amended the bill (each with his own amendment) to make it less deleterious to communities. Unlike the sham voice vote in the Public Utility Committee, Chairman Setzer of the Finance Committee had a recorded vote, allowing citizens to hold their representatives accountable.
After these amendments passed, the TWC lobbyist signaled for an aide. Shortly thereafter, the committee decided to table the matter until this week -- when TWC will undoubtedly try to remove or nullify those amendments.
In the meantime, AT&T has announced bandwidth caps, yet another reason the state is foolish to pin its broadband future on cable and DSL companies.
Compare AT&T's movement to less-broadband with Wilson Greenlight's recent dramatic price decreases in its ridiculously fast broadband network, causing at least one couple to move there! Greenlight is owned and operated by the public power company owned by the city.
Greenlight has signed up its first residential customers with the highest Internet speed available in Wilson. Vince and Linda Worthington, former Johnston County residents, moved to Wilson after finding out that they could have access to 40 Megabits per second Internet speeds at a lower cost than what they were previously paying. "We always wanted the 100Mbps service," she said.
Salisbury's Fibrant Making A Difference in Area Schools
Salisbury's Fibrant network in North Carolina was recently praised in a letter to the editor of a local paper for improving the educational tools in schools. These networks can have a big impact on educational opportunities, from directly improving the connections to the schools (often at lower prices) to lowering the cost of broadband across the entire community, thereby increasing broadband adoption and giving a new educational tool to children in home.
Previously, when the computers in our lab were being used, the entire system was bogged down. We had to limit the use of video and Skype to class periods where the lab computers were not being used. With some programs, we were not able to have a full class on the computers at the same time. ... Next up, we will be able to establish full connectivity between the main building and the kindergarten building. This will enable our phones, paging system, and file sharing to work together for the first time ever, and we are very excited about that!
Bill to Limit Broadband Competition in North Carolina Heads to House Finance Committee Next Week
On Wednesday, the bill to effectively ban community networks in North Carolina was passed out of the House Public Utilities Committee and will likely be heard by the Finance committee next week.
The audio is available here from the Wednesday meeting [mp3, 45 min].
It never fails to shock me how cavalierly some Committees refuse to discuss the bill, agreeing to let another Committee fundamentally change the bill. There is practically no discussion of what this bill does and very little discussion about the actual pros and cons of different approaches to providing broadband.
Listening to the discussion, one gets the distinct impression that a household either has "broadband" or doesn't. There is no discussion of the known failure of the private sector to invest in next-generation networks. If I were a Representative in North Carolina, I would be sure to ask why no private sector provider is building next-generation fiber-optic networks like those in Wilson, Salisbury, and hundreds of communities served by Verizon's FiOS outside the state. There is no discussion of the wisdom of relying on last-century cable and copper networks.
Those pushing this bill have no idea what they are doing. They may gut the potential for full fiber-optic networks in the state as the rest of the world charges forward building these networks. They are defending the horse-and-buggy industry in the age of automobiles.
Listen for the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce weighing in against community networks, the only entities investing in the next-generation networks needed for the digital economy. The Chamber cares more about its high profile members (cable and phone companies) than the 99% of businesses in North Carolina that need the kind of broadband available in Wilson and Salisbury. These organizations should not be allowed to get away with pretending to represent business interests in the state.
Those pushing this bill have no idea what they are doing. They may gut the potential for full fiber-optic networks in the state as the rest of the world charges forward building these networks. They are defending the horse-and-buggy industry in the age of automobiles.
Listen for the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce weighing in against community networks, the only entities investing in the next-generation networks needed for the digital economy. The Chamber cares more about its high profile members (cable and phone companies) than the 99% of businesses in North Carolina that need the kind of broadband available in Wilson and Salisbury. These organizations should not be allowed to get away with pretending to represent business interests in the state.